Warning: Dangerous Slurves Ahead

Reflecting on the volatile moods of the Atlanta Braves, a subject that has confounded more than a few wise baseball heads of late, Relief Pitcher Danny Frisella feels that after one full season with the team he has an explanation. "Remember," he says, invoking a credo passed on by some dugout sage, "half this game is 90% thinking."

That seemed to sum up the jumbled state of mind of a club that finished fifth in the National League's West Division last year by hitting better and pitching worse than any of its competitors. This season, after the big emotional blastoff of Henry Aaron's 715th home run, the Braves reverted to the old schizophrenic ways that Atlantans have come to know and reject. Playing before as few as 3,029 lonely souls, Manager Eddie Mathews' impressionable charges spent the first 5� weeks of the season so near the bottom of their top-heavy division that they were on the verge of predictability.

But wait. As any of the budding pop psychoanalysts on the Atlanta roster would readily attest, you can't keep a good manic-depressive team down. Beginning in mid-May, the Braves took off on a monumental high, winning 25 of 33 games to overtake the Cincinnati Reds and close to within five games of the front-running Los Angeles Dodgers. And they did it—surprise!—largely on the strength of their pitching.

Unaccustomed to such giddy heights, the Braves could be forgiven if they suffered a case of acrophobia last week, especially considering that they closed out June with nine games against the Reds and three against the Dodgers in just 10 days. Though the Braves lost eight of the 12, there was still exhilaration and a suggestion that this was a different Atlanta team in the fact that nine of the contests were decided by one run. For a club that once considered an 11-9 game something of a pitchers' duel, that was no small achievement. Says flame-haired Carl Morton, the muscular righthander who started off the 12-game stretch by blanking the Reds 1-0, "We're playing Dodger baseball now. We get two or three runs a game, play good defense and get good pitching. It's exciting baseball—if the heart holds out."

The mind, however, remains the critical factor. Four of the Braves' starters—Morton (10-6), veteran knuckleballer Phil Niekro (8-6), towering Ron Reed (5-4) and Roric Harrison (6-8)—are holdovers with a new outlook. Notably, they are cheered by the fact that nearly 50% fewer home runs are being hit in Atlanta Stadium these days because the fence in the left-center power alley has been moved back 10 feet.

But when it comes to positive thinking, the real difference in the Braves mound staff is an unlikely pair of freshly developed talents named Lee William (Buzz) Capra and Thomas Ross (Puma) House. Though they are frequently mistaken for bat boys, they take command on the field with a kind of Napoleonic air that is as effective as it is necessary. At 5'10" and 168 pounds Capra is just a shade smaller than House. Throughout their careers both have suffered because they do not fit the image of the modern major league pitcher: a tall, robust fire-baller. The Braves have come to think differently, even though they like to refer to the two as "our pair of pygmies."

Capra, 26, is a fidgety craftsman who mixes off-speed breaking pitches with a sneaky fastball. A righthander, he dips so low off the mound that he seems to deliver the ball from the vicinity of his kneecaps. "He can't throw high," says Aaron, "because he's so low to the ground to begin with."

Capra endures the ribbing good-naturedly, though he is convinced that he did not make his mark in the majors sooner because "they held my size against me. What people don't realize is that because you're small you work twice as hard and sometimes succeed twice as well as the big guys." As a Chicago schoolboy Capra went bare-chested to his freezing cold garage each winter morning to hang for several minutes from an iron bar. His father had a theory it would make him grow taller.

When Capra, an art major, left Illinois State in 1969 he was not highly touted—by a long stretch. Not only was he the 625th choice in the player draft, he was brought up to the majors by the New York Mets, a team that tended to measure its recruits by the strapping standards of its ace starters, Tom Scavcr and Jerry Koosman. Though Capra was mostly a starter in the minors, where he compiled a 42-17 record, he says the Mets put him "in the bullpen because they didn't think I was strong enough to go nine innings." In last year's playoffs with the Reds, his sole contribution was to warm up twice. "In the World Series," he says, "I did even better. I got to warm up five times."

House, 27, an amiable, bespectacled fellow, is a left-handed relief pitcher. On the mound he stirs memories of little Eddie Lopat, with his compact delivery and pinpoint control. Though his strikeout pitches are a wicked screwball and a "slurve," a cross between a curve and a slider, lately he has been taking more chances with his fastball which, says Braves Catcher Johnny Oates, "on a scale of five is a three."